Sbaro di Anzio

When a writer says "I'm no good," it is a conventional phrase that can mean any number of things in a desultory midsummer predawn with its fetid, heavy air. There are always the typical reasons for procrastination, but in this instance, it is the over-whelming weight of the obstacles to surmount as a woman's mid-fifties encroach, the difficulties of trying to reenter the labor force pretending one has the same enthusiasm and drive more readily tapped at a younger age. It is too late for children. The husband to divorce went as far as a broken wedding engagement. Equity in the quicksand of the welfare state is a pipe dream, and so dull edged free broadcast television is a form of equivocation with impending nullification.
"Go to bed," is an imperative ignored for the staid films of the late middle twentieth century, whose texture in Panavision, sometimes Technicolor, now has the drab feel of a Stalinist museum done in oil on canvas. Anzio has this quality, the sixties era spin about the folly of Europeans killing each other over political ideology, where Robert Mitchum as the skeptical liberal supposedly radicalizes World War II by parsing it down to an essence: men enjoy killing each other, while Peter Falk is the supporting foil who needs the adrenaline. In terms of the zillions of war films out there, Anzio evades the moral repercussions of genocide and types of governance for which we engage in armed conflict. As a character study it doesn't engage with any sartorial interest, given its historical context. Black and whites from this generation seem more energetic even when script writers bracket them as if they were being read off the newswire.
This was the next. My life is over. A wail of narcissism, of poverty, loneliness. A black and white of more of the same, or so the failed writer thought. Anthony Quinn. Brave Bulls. Another tiresome war film? No. Mel Ferrer has the Hollywood face the camera loves in a lanky body. A documentary style film about Mexican bull fighting without really much of a storyline, but Mexico isn't much of a storyline. Mexico is the tragic end result of exploitation and interbreeding between Spaniards and Aztecs, that reputedly fierce tribe of human sacrifice which couldn't stand up to horses or bayonets or measles. Interior digression wonders how the United States was so lucky, but the convenient answer is lack of British stomach for killing its former subjects who rejected a monarchy for something much worse: the federal government, which really only started to become what it is today under the Roosevelts. Another story.

One thinks of Ciudid Juarez as a dangerous city in relation to kidnappings for ATM withdrawals, or Traffic with Michael Douglas. Rossen's story is much more schematic than that, and yet has the same fractures beneath its surface; the developing world is a literal anxiety, an exposure of civilized insecurity. The fact remains that a that majority of peoples eek out a life of subsistence. This writer's American subsistence is perhaps a notch or two above the contemporary Hispanic working class which stays put. Rossen seems to wish to convey with this weird film something about those who didn't migrate, about defiance against the odds, that bravery may not be what it appears. That a white Mexican platinum blond woman is a premium trophy too good to be true, so she dies off camera with Quinn, a diffident traitor to his protégé. Ferrer recovers his manhood in the slaying of a good fighter. Thud. What the hell was this?

Remembered childhood debate about bullfighting with a closet lesbian. Youthful conscience made strenuous objections. Fifty three may be a more dispassionate age, but there is still discomfort with the business of breeding powerful  cattle for torture, even as Rossen illustrates the alternate view of the matador as a professional engaged in a unique cultural signature, a vestige of imperial glorification, endeared to the citizens of a weak state, one that resents invasions and loss of territory. The gay Hispanic writer Richard Rodriquez claims the Hispanic race is a fiction, without qualifying what he meant by it, and an otherwise unemployed journalist who hasn't had a contract in years can't pretend to have the camaraderie with an angry liberal and former public television regular to ask what he meant by it, unless one extrapolates from it that sorting out the indigenous tribes from those of mixed race heritage doesn't make the people in Latin America a homogeneous ethnicity.

The bulls never win in the contest, even if the occasional goring due to lapse of attention or skill leads to death. The bull is never honored like Baal, the Mesopotamian threat to an anthropomorphic creator. A pause to consider the folly of rooting for aggressive male herd animals over an aggrandized species like homo sapiens, though in our collective intelligence, we enjoy rooting for the underdog's ability to strike back against our system, our technologies. Godzilla, Lassie, Black Beauty, the Lion King, why not the damn bull if the animal is to be used for entertainment and gilded displays of predatory gaming dominance? It is a symbolic totem in the world of high finance, whose gilded capital only trickles down the margins of static safety nets of the predominant welfare state, so top heavy it boggles the mind, the strictures of entitlement.

It too is a business, socialism. Women without looks need something to do, so they case manage indigence, their pensions in some sort of portfolio, all of us with a paper trail, the most marginalized to the most affluent, commingling only in theatrical downfalls of our fictions, or disgraced in scandals, while those in anonymity, broken by the service sector and impulsive choices, remain resistant to commercial formulas, value content, angry with the patronizing assurances of disability intake centers whose bread and butter is the Medicaid Waiver budget, basically no more than a regulated pimping system for low skill caretakers, the one in downtown Philadelphia run by a legally blind Mexican lawyer whose outcomes are no better than those before him, Thomas Earle, who paces softly, an effeminate man, girlish legs and buttocks, often tapped for speeches, offering ten minute conversations to those expurgated or preyed upon, of course, unable to beat the clock, aging out of a vindicated matriculation. Due to his vested interests, Mr. Earle couldn't be expected to admit to bad coordination leading to victimized outcomes. That is why we have tort, and settlements off the docket, unless circumstances precluded the hire of legal assistance, and we continue to sink, hostile landlord, hostile paradigm, toppling under our own weight, like the last shot of the bull, lying recombinant, really dead by sword thrust, or wrangled by a handler, the climax is still the same. The beast is slain. Hail the conquistador.